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Comment by Avtomatk | Hacker News Reader

I feel that it is still too early to approve the use of this vehicle ... Not only does it need an aircraft and vehicle license, this car is a "hybrid car-plane" and its "transformation" from car to plane on the streets should also be regulated. (Imagine deploying and turning on those propellers in the middle of a narrow street, it would be necessary to take it to a heliport to transform it) apart from the control of the airspace and an endless number of other things (collisions with buildings?). It's the classic pre-"flying cars" regulation from science fiction stories.

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This sort of thinking coupled with increasing ease of litigation is why general aviation is more expensive in real terms than it was in the 70s.

And... is this (the regulations and standards) good or bad? It is good if you compare the number of air and car accidents before there were "regulatory licenses" and "industry standards" and now

Not an expert, but I hear that one of the effects has been to slow down innovation.

Because a newly designed plane (with a rescue parachute, and a modern engine) is so much more expensive than one from the 1950s (leaded gas, possibly with grandfathered certification) everyone keeps flying the old ones. Cars have had many iterations on safety since the '55 Chevy, but planes not so many.

The whole FAA/EASA cert process is burdensome, but it is worth noting that the aviation industry has an impressive safety record. It is not at all comparable to the safety of a '55 chevy.

_Commercial aviation_ has a stellar safety record. The safety record for private and general aviation flying is pretty atrocious, and non-airline commercial operations (part 91, part 135) have varying levels of safety somewhere in between.

I think there can be little argument against the assertion that modernizing the general aviation fleet would improve safety. The majority of GA aircraft are using 60's technology carburetted reciprocating engines and running on leaded gasoline, and the cockpit is mostly analogue gauges with mechanical vacuum-driven gyros. Every car manufactured since the 90's uses fuel injection, yet GA pilots still need to worry about carburetor icing. That's not even going into other modern safety improvements like digital autopilot or ballistic recovery parachutes.

> It is good if you compare the number of air and car accidents before there were "regulatory licenses" and "industry standards" and now

But for this comparison to make sense you need to assume that the counterfactual scenario involves zero decrease in air and car accidents between then and now.

This beggars belief; people seek to avoid accidents for other reasons than "regulators frown on them".

It might beggar belief but it seems to be supported by data. Motor vehicle deaths per capita only started consistently dropping in the mid seventies.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

And by the same data, that's also doubling from an average ~5,000mi travelled per capita in 1970 to ~10,000mi.

Edit: Interesting to note that pedestrian fatalities took a sharp rise from 2010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

> that's also doubling from an average ~5,000mi travelled per capita in 1970 to ~10,000mi.

More than that; the chart shows fatalities per vehicle mile starting at their all-time high and falling steadily thereafter. Exactly like you'd expect if people were trying to avoid fatalities. Nothing special happens in 1970, where fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled have already fallen to 4.7 from, say, 21 in 1923.

47 years in the other direction, fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2017 are 1.16, a decline of 75.5% compared to the previous 47 years' 77.4%.

You're indeed right. Though, I'm not sure how you disentangle effects from shifts in public policy and legal frameworks over that entire time span. My guess is: people died -> loved ones were upset -> political and commercial pressure mounted -> improvements were made.

It might be that commercial interests often align with public safety and perception, but I bet that on the lower-end of the price spectrum, people would be willing to buy cars that endangered themselves and others. If only for lack of options.

People are notoriously bad at evaluating catastrophic failure event chances.

Most people will say: "Yeah, it's a big unsafe (they won't even phrase it like that), but I will be more careful and it will be all right".

Then the next day they'll go to that party and drive home tipsy.

The cognitive dissonance won't even register.

I find it funny that people still believe that, in the midst of this pandemic where a decent chunk of the population (10-20-30%?) completely ignore public guidelines or even their best interest.

An interesting and non-obvious attribute of autogyros is that the large propeller on the top is actually not powered.

wat? that is very interesting and incredibly non obvious.

You can see the pusher prop on the back in one of the photos. Looks like fun

I've linked this elsewhere in the discussion: https://xkcd.com/1972/

It won't get approval to launch from the streets, simply because you already aren't allowed to launch a helicopter or plane from the street. It will remain a two mode vehicle which you will have to drive / fly to an airport or otherwise licensed location before it is allowed to transform / take off / land.

This legislation is unlikely to change anytime soon.

You can't land/takeoff an aircraft from public roads, for obvious reasons, but it's perfectly legal to do so to/from suitable open terrain, which in the case of light aircraft isn't hard to find. So while you're not going to be taking off directly from the highway (nor would you likely want to), it should be perfectly legal to drive off to a short trail somewhere and launch from there.

Anyway, I don't see it feasible to buy one of these, spend 500,000+ USD to occasionally travel somewhere on your vacation? That is the same reason why we did not buy a helicopter (mainly because we would have it parked throughout the year and also, the energy consumption makes it unviable for daily use).

Until a car is created that can take off from the streets and has low energy consumption, it cannot be said that we have a "flying car", at the moment we only have a "car-helicopter hybrid".

As someone learning to fly, I do see a great usecase though. There are a reasonable number of airfields in the UK and I can usually rely on there being one within a reasonable distance of where I want to go. That "reasonable distance" is still going to be some miles though. The ability to fly most of the way, land at an airfield and then drive the last bit makes a lot of sense.

Legislation is less of a factor than the presence of overhead utility lines near most public streets.

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